AMD cosies up with Oracle over Hadoop

Read between the lines?

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AMD is well-known for its graphics chips

AMD performed the first public demonstration of Apache Hadoop running on its Opteron A1100 development platform; these are 64-bit ARM Cortex-A57 processors that are targetting the highly lucrative datacentre market.

The event took place at Oracle's JavaOne conference in San Francisco and used bog standard Linux distribution from Fedora and OpenSuse. Oddly enough shares in AMD have fallen heavily since the announcement, by nearly 4%, valuing the company at less than $3 billion.

The demo was more of a showcase for AMD than it was for Oracle; Hadoop is already a popular framework for storage and large-scale data processing and the Austin-based chip vendor is keen to find other revenue streams outside its usual desktop/mobile CPU/GPU segments.

Java for ARM is currently in beta with general availability predicted for early next year. Oracle has also been working with some of AMD's own rivals including Applied Microsystesm - which provided HP with chips for its new Moonshot servers and Cavium.

Big advantage

AMD however has two big advantage compared to the rest of the aspiring ARM server partners. Its GPU could be used as application-specific accelerators and its Opteron brand is a known quantity and a trusted brand with OEMs.

Also worth noting, AMD and Oracle - together with Qualcomm, Imagination Technologies, ARM and a few others - are members of the Heterogeneous System Architecture (HSA) group whose aim is to facilitate the management of different compute units.

However, other than the announcement, the other question that will be on everyeones lips is "Will Oracle buy AMD?"